News and notes from around the interweb:
- Last day to enter by leaving a comment in my big hotel points giveaway courtesy of the Mobile Suites app.
- Lawsuit against Southwest Airlines over the Companion Pass: Man sues because his purchases on the Southwest co-brand credit card made after his statement cutoff date in early December didn’t post until January 2015 — and didn’t count — even though his spending occurred in 2014.
- The new United.com, that was supposed to launch in 2013, may launch in summer 2015. “”We didn’t want to be date-driven.”
- Hotels putting RFID chips in their towels. Some may know when you take the towels off-property. Time for another towel amnesty?
- The homeless couple that live at Heathrow. Of course there’s about fifty homeless living at Frankfurt.
- Over the summer I asked “Is the A380 a failure?” In December Airbus had a dust up with the largest A380 operator Emirates over too-candid comments that they’re considering ending the proram. Now comes projections that heavy maintenance will run $7 billion on 150 A380s over the next 4 years, or nearly double what United and Delta spend on maintenance for their entire fleets combined. Development of an A380neo makes no sense.
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Agree from an award redeemer the A380 is a dream plane, particularly when you can get an F “cabin” on SQ or QF among other alliance carriers. But I am sure BA, LH and AF rue the day they were pretty much forced to buy the planes because Airbus was a strategic player in the EU economic plan. Yes, they’ve benefited slightly from being able to combine flights on some high demand routes and thus receive some marginal operating economies. However, they also ensured their major competitor, EK (followed by the two other Gulf copycat carriers) had a plane with an insatiable demand to fill seats and thus led to fare discounting on prime Europe to Asia routes. EK may soon pay the price as costs mount on maintenance of the fleet. (Those Asian carriers that bought the A380 are still figuring out where to fly them. MH in particular.)
I suppose the A380 will have a longer, somewhat more successful life than Concorde, but the real revolution in long haul air travel was the virtually unheralded 773 which undercut many of the rationales for the jumbo jets, its sister 744/748 and the A380…big loads, long distances. And the 787 will achieve the same success on a smaller scale, opening up more nonstop city pairs or bring more convenient flight times/frequencies on existing routes.
It’ll be interesting to see how EK fares in 10 years…once this tantrum over the A380neo settles down.
The guy suing Southwest had a common misunderstanding, but a lawsuit is a highly improper response. I’ll bet a snail letter politely asking to move his points earnings from January to December would have succeeded, but now he doesn’t have that option.
This Southwest lawsuit seems super selfish. If I was Southwest I’d be thinking about making the companion pass based on flying only not spend, when I had to deal with this lawsuit. Not worth the time or money to deal with it.